When Janet Flanner arrived in Paris from New York in 1922, she foresaw her literary future as a writer of fiction. Aged 30, Flanner had recently disentangled herself from an inappropriate marriage and admitted that she was more strongly attracted to women than to men. She had embarked on a novel with the modern-sounding title "The Cubical City", was trying to compose poetry, and occasionally wrote articles for newspapers and magazines.

Her Left Bank companion was Solita Solano, an actress turned writer who was likewise on the run from convention. The pair would be friends for life, though not always lovers. Solita had been disinherited and had invented a new identity (her real name was Sarah Wilkinson), but she and Flanner were hardly impoverished. They spent a year touring Greece, Italy and Germany before taking four rooms on a long-term basis at the modest Hotel St Germain des Prés on the Rue Bonaparte. They would not have heard of the Lost Generation, but anyway, whatever it was, it was not them. Flanner stayed in hotels for much of her life; later, she lived at the Ritz.

In addition to her fiction and sapphic poetry, Flanner wrote letters: to her mother, who worried about her daughter's strong-headedness; to her deserted husband, who appears to have remained loyal and affectionate for years to come; and to an old Manhattan friend, Jane Grant, who had married a journalist named Harold Ross. In 1925, he was about to become editor of the newly founded New Yorker, a topical magazine of news and humour. The New Yorker in its infancy had few highbrow pretensions (it was left to its rival, Vanity Fair, to publish the likes of Aldous Huxley, Djuna Barnes and Edmund Wilson).

The Rosses must have shared Flanner's letters - as people did - for in the summer of that year, when the magazine had been running for just a few months, Grant invited her to send a fortnightly dispatch from Paris. Ross, she said, "wants anecdotal and incidental stuff familiar to Americans... dope on fields of the arts and a little on fashion, perhaps... there should be lots of chat about people seen about and in it all he wants a definite personality injected. In fact, any of your letters would be just the thing."

Thus, Flanner began writing home, eventually for the eyes of more than half a million readers, as she would to a confidante. Flanner's correspondents must have looked forward to her witty responses to the ordinary sights and sounds of the city. From the start, her prose had a natural eagerness. The personality that comes through her reports is cultivated, to the point, and possessed of a seemingly inexhaustible supply of pithy phrases.

For the new book by James Joyce (after Ulysses), "the civilised half of a half-civilised world has long been humbly waiting" (Flanner admired but did not like Joyce). A new publication by Jean Cocteau provides "an hour's delight". Assessing the late Isadora Duncan's dancing talent, she wrote: "By an economy (her first) she had arrived at elimination." The sentence exists only to serve the parenthesis. With the labour of regular, fortnightly production, Flanner's approach to her subject matter became deliberate and polished - polished to the sheen of brilliant conversation.

Flanner writes in her own introduction to Paris Was Yesterday, the volume in which her early pieces were collected, that Ross wanted to know "what the French thought was going on in France, not what I thought was going on", but her memory is contradicted by the letter from Grant, as it is; more subtly, by the "Letters" themselves, particularly in the early years. Flanner would not have seen herself as a tourist (thought it's fair to say that her hosts would have), but she was an outsider, fraternising with other expatriates, keeping her passport secure and her American identity intact. She was, however, an outsider who was "in the know". Subscribers to the New Yorker visiting Paris for the first time would have felt safely guided through the obscurities of Montparnasse and Montmartre by the glow of Flanner's prose.

Ross appreciated this, and steadily raised her fee; his successor William Shawn appreciated it too, and Flanner, as "Genêt" (no one seems certain of where the name came from, though it may be a cod-French pronunciation of "Janet"), continued to file her "Letter from Paris" until August 1975, a precise half-century. She returned to New York, unwell but still maintaining a desk at the New Yorker, and died in the city three years later at 86.

Flanner may have been unconventional in some areas of behaviour, but she was not bohemian. She absorbed the dramas and entertainments that Paris tossed up in seemingly endless waves - the debut of Josephine Baker, the last days of Diaghilev, the performance of the one-handed piano virtuoso Paul Wittgenstein, the crimes of passion (in Paris, she said, no one kills anyone they don't know) - but she puzzled over the avant garde.

Famous dressmaking houses and theatrical premieres were more her scene than experimental magazines and small-press editions. Cubism was something she sought to have "explained". Ezra Pound struck her as a phoney, rather than as someone who was struggling to haul literature into the 20th century to sit comfortably beside abstract painting. In response to the ballooning creativity of Paris of the 1920s and 30s, Flanner was sometimes impelled to issue a puncturing jab.

Among her friends she counted Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company (publisher of Ulysses) and Margaret Anderson, whose Little Review had issued Joyce's novel in serial form and been prosecuted for its trouble. These women were all in the vanguard of modern art. Flanner appreciated their efforts, but there was a distance between her and them; a difference of comportment.

Brenda Wineapple, whose excellent biography of Flanner, Genêt, appeared in 1989, tells us that Flanner and her friends always dressed impeccably, they donned gloves to take tea at Le Select in the afternoons, she put on furs to meet her ex-husband and his new wife, to discuss her financial investments. "She was attracted to the events and pastimes of a leisure class," writes Wineapple.

Anderson offended Flanner by saying that she would be unable to appreciate Anderson's novella unless she had already read a review of it. These barbs may contain some truth, but the fact is that Anderson's fiction has vanished while Flanner's journalism remains present. She is that happy species of writer, first rate though not necessarily of the first rank, who finds her niche and thrives there.

When the rumblings from Hitler's Germany were felt even through the floor of the Brasserie Lipp, Flanner at first tried to ignore the portents (as who would not?), then to persuade herself that things were not as bad as some made them out to be. Her three-part profile of Hitler, "Führer", which appeared in the New Yorker in early 1936, was thought by some to take the threat he represented insufficiently seriously.

When Flanner went to Berlin again in the summer, to cover the Olympic Games, she returned with a phrase in her notebook about the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, which wormed its unironic way into the piece she wrote for the New Yorker: he was "apparently the most liberal official patron of the arts in Germany today".

By the time war was declared, Flanner had overridden such views, which may be pardoned as the indiscretion of an affluent American on an expenses-paid trip to the sporting spectacle of the decade. The Berlin Olympics would become notorious in years to come, but as Flanner observed in 1938: "History looks queer when you're standing close to it."

She wrote sensitively of the phoney peace in Paris before the German occupation. Her gut hatred of the whole unsteady and unsteadying situation comes out in an article written in early 1939, when the "peace" was all but exposed: "No one alive today can know which side's dead men will win the war."

Flanner left France just as the Germans were moving in, and saw out the war years in New York. She returned after the Liberation, and began filing again in December 1944. War was not where she wanted to be. Once she resumed, however, she had a new circus to attend: Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir in jovial despair at the Café de Flore; Jean Genet with his hand in their pockets; Samuel Beckett with his "curious and interesting" play, Waiting for Godot; the temptations of communism for the French intelligentsia. Her dispatches from the post-war decades were published as Paris Journal in 1965.

I first read Flanner when gathering material for my book Paris Interzone, which attempts to evoke the anglophone literary world on the Left Bank after the second world war. I recall the satisfaction, reading her Paris "Letters", of catching the melody of an era that has faded yet is still discernible in the particular rhythm of Paris today. Flanner, as much as any writer I can think of, clarifies that rhythm and makes it familiar. She allows us the grand feeling that, while it's all different, it's all much the same.

However, it would be a centimetre off the mark to say that Flanner's "Letters from Paris" of the 1920s and 30s grant you the illusion that you were there. Rather, they give the intense and delightful experience of reading someone who was there. The pleasure is literary. Very little journalism retains its lustre after 75 years. When it does, as Genêt's surely does, it has the surprise of great photography, as distinct from great painting. Yesterday in Paris, frozen, not posed.

· This is an edited extract from James Campbell's Introduction to Paris Was Yesterday by Janet Flanner, published by Virago

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About this article

Genêt does Paris

This article appeared on p37 of the Guardian review section of the Guardian
on Friday 28 November 2003.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 06.54 EST on Saturday 29 November 2003.
It was last modified at 06.54 EST on Monday 8 December 2003.
It was first published at 06.54 EST on Monday 8 December 2003.